EASP Summer School 2022

Agnieszka Sorokowska is an associate professor at the Institute of Psychology (University of Wroclaw) where she is a head of the Smell and Taste Research Lab. Her previous affiliations include Technische Universitaet Dresden and Stockholm University. Multidisciplinary research program of Agnieszka Sorokowska and her team relates mostly to sensory perception, cross-cultural and cognitive psychology, although many of her studies also combine other disciplines, like anthropology or neuroscience. She conducted studies in West Papua, Bolivian Amazon or Pacific Islands. Together with Piotr Sorokowski, she is a leader of the Cross-Cultural Research Group that comprises over 100 scientists from all over the world and regularly conducts multidisciplinary, cross-cultural projects. In her current research, conducted within two grants funded by Polish National Science Centre, Agnieszka Sorokowska focuses on sensory components of food neophobia in children and on developmental changes in psychological traits during transition to parenthood.

Eerika Finell is a professor of social psychology at the University of Eastern Finland. She has completed her PhD degree at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests lay on intragroup processes, and how they shape people’s experience, well-being, attitudes, and intergroup relations. Her multimethod research has analysed these issues in two fields: i) multicultural contexts and national identity, and ii) environmental threats. In these fields, she has been especially focused on slow moving and often unnoticed everyday phenomena and on groups that may find difficult to make their voices heard such as children and migrant mothers.

Currently, she is leading two research programmes: one focusing on mothers’ intergroup contacts (Funded by Kone foundation) and the other on the psychosocial effects of building-related health problems in schools (Funded by the Academy of Finland).

Bogdan Wojciszke is a professor of psychology in SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities. His research interests involve social cognition, moral judgments, consequences of power, and beliefs in the nature of social world. He published 10 books and over 170 papers – many in leading international journals. In 1989-1991 and 2005 he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, in 2017 a visiting professor in University of Cambridge. He is a member of Polish Academy of Science and a fellow of Association for Psychological Science.

Dr. Aleksandra Cichocka is a Reader in Political Psychology at the University of Kent (UK), where she leads the Political Psychology Lab. She investigates how the ways people feel about themselves and the social groups they belong to affect their political attitudes and behaviours. She has published over 60 journal articles and book chapters on topics such as political ideology, conspiracy beliefs, intra-and intergroup attitudes, and support for socio-political systems. This research has received several awards, including the EASP Jos Jaspars Medal. Aleksandra currently serves as Vice-President of the International Society of Political Psychology.

Dr. Aleksandra Cislak is Associate Professor of Psychology at SWPS University, Head of the Center for Research on Social Relations, Co-Director of post-graduate program in Creative Leadership, and Vice President of the Polish Association of Social Psychology.

Her research work centers on social hierarchy, including the effects of having power over others and being subjected to power of others, and the intersection of power and gender. She is interested in how the topic of gender bias is represented in scientific, political and everyday discourse. She conducts her research using a range of methods including experimental, survey and observational studies involving language corpora. Her current project focuses on the modes of social identification and intragroup effects across a broad range of group contexts including national groups, teams, political parties and business organizations.

Michał Bilewicz is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Warsaw, Poland, where he chairs the Center for Research on Prejudice. Previously, he was a Fulbright scholar at the New School for Social Research (USA) and DAAD post-doctoral fellow at University of Jena (Germany). His research interests include reconciliation processes, dehumanization, prejudice, collective moral emotions and linguistic aspects of intergroup relations. His main contributions to social psychology include moral exemplars based model of reconciliation (developed together with Sabina Cehajic-Clancy), epidemic model of hate speech (together with Wiktor Soral) and the three-factorial model of antisemitic prejudice. He co-ordinates the first Polish survey on xenophobia – the nationally representative Polish Prejudice Survey (first round in 2009, second in 2013, third in 2017). Currently he coordinates a research project on hate speech epidemics funded by the Polish National Science Centre.

Sylvie Graf is leading senior researcher at the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences, where she founded and leads the Brno Lab of Intergroup Processes. Her main research interest relates to improving relations between social groups – through intergroup contact, mass media exposure, and careful use of language describing people in intergroup context. Prof Graf’s work originally combines different theoretical perspectives (social psychology, personality psychology, media and communication studies, political science), using varied methodological approaches (cross-sectional, experimental, longitudinal and qualitative data analysis) in diverse cultural contexts (multi-national studies,
Czech Republic, Switzerland, post-conflict societies).

Samantha J. Heintzelman is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ where she directs the Well-Being Lab. Dr. Heintzelman’s research focuses on the experience of meaning in life for average people in everyday life, addressing questions regarding the function, structure, antecedents, and consequences of this experience. In addition, Dr. Heintzelman has developed an empirically-based and empirically-tested intervention program to sustainably increase subjective well-being, identify mechanisms of happiness change, and examine causal effects of happiness for relationships and health. Her work also explores person and contextual factors that influence the pursuit of happiness.

Wijnand (pronounced ‘wine and cheese’) van Tilburg is an experimental social psychologist. His research mainly concerns the study of emotion in context of meaning, interpersonal judgment, and decision making. Within these areas he has been particularly active in the study of boredom and nostalgia.

Wijnand received his Bachelor's and Research Master's degrees in psychology at Tilburg University in 2006 and 2008, respectively. In 2011, he completed his PhD degree at the University of Limerick, investigating the psychological signature and consequences of boredom. This was followed by a post as Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in psychology. In April 2013, Wijnand joined the School of Psychology of the University of Southampton as Research Fellow and was Lecturer in the Psychology Department of King's College London from September 2015 to November 2019. He joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex in November 2019.

Shahar Ayal is currently an Associate Professor at Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology at Reichman University, (IDC) Herzliya, Israel. Prof. Ayal earned his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Tel Aviv University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Technion and then at the Fuqua school of Business at Duke University where he specialized in behavioral economics. Prof. Ayal's research focuses on heuristics and biases, unethical behavior and the effects of inter-group relations on morality. Prof. Ayal is one of the founders of the DICE@IDC research center, which aims to develop de-biasing applications and make decision-research insights more easily accessible to academics, practitioners, and organizations. (https://www.idc.ac.il/en/pages/faculty.aspx?username=s.ayal)

Paul Conway is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. His interests revolve around three main topics: how people make moral dilemma judgments, the nature and operation of the moral self, and the role of morality in person perception. In particular, he applies a technique called ‘Process Dissociation’ to independently examine the role of harm-rejection versus outcome-maximization response tendencies in moral dilemmas. Paul Conway won the 2014 Dissertation Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, the 2014 Governor General of Canada’s Gold Medal for Academic Excellence, and the 2020 Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science.

Hans (Rocha) IJzerman is an associate professor at Université Grenoble Alpes. He obtained his undergraduate degree at St Vincent College in Latrobe, PA, US, and his master's (Amsterdam) and PhD (Utrecht) both in the Netherlands. His main research interests are split between social thermoregulation and meta-science. He currently lives between lake and mountains in France with his family and two cats.

Caterina Suitner is an Associate Professor at University of Padova where she teaches Persuasion and Social Influence, Work and Organizational Psychology, and Social Network Analysis. Her research focuses on the relationship between social cognition and language, with particular attention to the role of para-semantic linguistic features and their role in attitude formation (e.g., trust in vaccines) and belief in fake news, social inequality, and gender issues. She is Editor in Chief of European Journal of Social Psychology. 

She published in journals such as Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Social Cognition. She is incoming Editor in Chief of the European Journal of Social Psychology, she has contributed to several edited books, has edited special issues for Social Psychology and for the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, she co-authored the book Living in an Asymmetrical World, published by Psychology Press. C. Suitner spent 1 year as Ph.D. in Melbourne, 6 months at the New School, and 5 months at the New York University as visiting scholar, strengthening her ties with the international community.